Arthur Erickson on how Hylio drones are revolutionizing agriculture

0:00Welcome to episode 237 of the Robot Report Podcast. I'm your host, Mike Weitzman, Senior Editor for the Robot Report. Thanks as always for tuning in. And join this week by Jean Dmitry. He's the Editorial Director for the Robot Report and Automated Warehouse. Jean, welcome back to the co-hosts to see it this week. Happy to be back. So, no spoilers, but Mike, did you see Project Hail Mary yet? I did. I was so stoked. We, Rihanna and I talked about it last week before the big weekend and I'm a big sci-fi fan. I know you are as well, a big bookworm and super excited to have seen the movie. It was amazing. Like I said, no spoilers for folks that haven't been, but this is the movie that you have to see this spring. I think it's the movie, yeah, the movie of the spring so far, right? Yeah, you know,

1:00like you, I'm a big science fiction fan and this one was pretty true to the book and there is at least one robot in it. Not necessarily a spoiler, but I thought the robot was portraying in the really realistic fashion. Yeah. This isn't a spoiler, but the science behind it was really tried to be not too futuristic, right? The whole idea of how the spacecraft flies and all the rest is built in real science. For the most part, there are some made-up things, but it's not warp drive. That's involved here is that futuristic things that the physics rules entirely. And I thought that was an interesting way to conceive it and it's the same thing with the Martian as well was built on pretty much real science, the prior book. So I enjoy that kind of reading as well as movie experience as well as the far-out Star Wars in a galaxy far, far away, right?

2:02Well, anything with robots that has our attention, so. Yeah, that's right. But you see the story also this week from Lucky Matt, which one is going on. There was a patent conflict between Ocado and Brightpick. So Ocado apparently called the cops. Brightpick started to show which forced Brightpick to cover its booth, which had, I believe, the new grid picker system. But what was interesting in a marketing move, in a smart marketing move, Brightpick Sprite painted the tarp for the sheet that was hanging over things and said, so good, they don't want you to see it. And why are you so afraid on the drain for me? Again, you know, I'm not a lawyer, I can't comment on the technologies or IP involved. But it is interesting to see companies openly falling at a trade show. Well, yeah, Jean, I mean, I've been to so many trade shows in my career as an applications engineer and a product manager over the years. There's always that friendly

3:04competition, you know who your competitors are. You know when they're snooping around your booth and all their rest. But it's still all part of the game, right? And I think that this is the first time in my experience, my career that I've seen something go as far as calling the cops on a competitor because they had potentially a technology that's patent and fringing and blocking its launch. And I think kudos to Jan Zisk and the Brightpick team for being the guerrilla marketers that they are here and how they responded, right? So I don't know how us would you respond? Because I'm sure there were some frustration and all the investment that they made to bring the system over there and get it set up. I mean, that's a huge investment in time and resources for any company to prepare for an event like this. But to respond with the guerrilla marketing as you describe, you know, on the drapes, do some spray painting and actually get a lot of unpaid exposure out of it. So maybe that in the end of it is a good investment for you on the

4:08team through all of this for the fact that we're talking about it and everyone else is a lot of the big press was talking about it as well this week. And Mike, can you tell me what's the difference between, you know, obviously there's legitimate patent concerns and that's her, the courts and lawyers to resolve. But there's also something called submarine patents. Why do you mean by that? You know, I've experienced submarine patents in my career in the most famous one in the robotics industry is the Lemelson patents. So that the Lemelson was an inventor, probably about 40 years ago, supposedly invented, had some patents for vision, vision guidance, vision perception, that type of thing. That's at least what would one of the things we got hit with in early in my career at a depth. And as did everybody else, cognizx, everybody in the vision industry got hit with this was called a submarine patent because Lemelson never created an actual device. He had the patents, he sold the patents to a bunch of lawyers. They sat on them for a while. The industry

5:12evolved, began building cameras, putting them on robots and deploying them. And then suddenly these patents came up from nowhere. That's the submarine part of this. They popped up and said, hey, you guys all owe us money or we're going to sue you into the ground kind of thing. And so that's the concept of a submarine patent that you don't believe applies. And back in those days, of course, we didn't have, you had to have a patent lawyer sit down and read all the documents right. The whole searching index was a catalog form of search. So you know, research was a lot harder, it was hard to interpret everything. Now, of course, it's much simpler to plow through all that information, but that's not the, that's not the excuse here. And so, you know, being able to interpret as will be in this case, you know, is there really infringement or not? And, you know, I just sort of cavalierly said that, you know, I don't see the, the Ocado robots with the Scarab robot on top of them. So how is this a patent infringement on what they're doing? They're not drilling down and pulling boxes out of the ASRS and moving them around. They're just

6:17pulling things out of the top layer of toe. So, you know, I don't know, a lot of people smarter than me going to figure this out, but I think we just wanted to bring this to, to, to notice and, and at least talk about the situation that occurred in, in like a minute, last week. All right. Well, hey, Jean. So on the show today, our interesting conversation with Arthur Erickson, he's CEO and co-founder of highly old drones. That'll be a little bit later in the show. You and I had a chance to sit down and talk with him earlier this week and we're going to learn about that their business. And, you know, we're going to also, we put him on the hot seat to talk a little bit about the Chinese drone ban and what that's done for their business as, is one of the handful of US-made drone manufacturers. So that, you know, they're definitely profiting from that whole situation in Arthur goes into detail with us a little bit later on the show. Now, Jean, before we get that, one of the other things that's taken a lot of our time, starting taking a lot of Steve's time as we were talking about it in the green room,

7:19is getting ready for the upcoming robotic summit in your backyard. We're having a big barbecue, right, Jean? You're, you're cooking burgers for everybody that's coming. That's on May 27th and 28th in Boston. It's actually will be downtown, the big convention center there. We expect 250 plus exhibitors in 5,000 attendees. So it's, you know, so far, we're on track to meet that, maybe even exceed that this year, Jean. So it's going to be yet another robot party. Looking forward to it, we've got lots of great keynote speakers lined up here. I'm looking forward to seeing Russ Trajake on stage to unveil his new stealth AI startup. That's going to be a moment that not to miss. We've also got Michael Taylor. She's a head of robotics at GM, really looking forward to her session as well. We'll have a panel on building reliable robots that include representatives from Q&X, UR, Locus, Boston Dynamics, and others. I'll be leading a panel on humanoids and I've

8:23got representatives from Boston Dynamics, Agility, and ASTM on that panel. So that's going to be a good one. I'm starting to work on that. And Jean, I'm also excited to see the closing keynote. Steve's going to be on stage with Nolan Arbaugh. He's the first Neuralink user and he's going to demo the Neuralink for us and we're going to get to hear about his life story and how Neuralink has given him some agency back in his life and his current situation. So really looking forward to meeting Nolan and seeing that. All right. And just as a reminder to everybody listening, we've got a special reward for all of you and that's a special discount code to register. So don't register until you finish the episode today. We'll give you that discount code near the end of the show. It'll help you save some money in your registration and you can go sign up at RoboticSummit.com. All right. Just as a reminder, again, you can always get the latest news and

9:24information in our network of websites as well as our newsletter. Make sure you sign up for the newsletter to get it in your inbox at the robot report and automated warehouse. So in the news this week, one of the top items was Amazon has acquired Unally Developer Fauna Robotics. And this is an interesting case because I'm saying Amazon is well known for having robots in its warehouses and it has also had interest in consumer robotics at one point looking to buy iRobot. And now this Fauna Robotics acquisition is the latest or rainfall in that story, right? Because Fauna has been developing Sprout, which is a humanoid platform for R&D. That's not necessarily the same thing as a as a consumer or commercial robot just yet, but it is interesting to see Amazon

10:27said that it's taking a quote well thought out and measured approach to truly understand the potential of personal robots. And that still sounds like R&D to me, but we do buy a company just to find out that approach. It's an interesting move on their part. Also because it comes less than a week after Amazon acquired River, which is a company that develops quadruped wheeled robots for door stop delivery. I actually thought that that made a lot of sense. Again, Amazon's last while last hundred yard fulfillment story. But I think Amazon is probably hedging its bets and saying okay, we'll have that for certain types of parcels. And maybe we'll have a humanoid to bring under types of parcels to your doorstep. I wouldn't be surprised if that's where ends of going, but what do you think might? Well, you know, the acquisition of Sprout in Fauna is an interesting

11:27acquisition. Look, I think Sprout's a cute little robot. It's definitely adorable. It's a, you know, it's not, it's child size. It's not human, it's not adult human sized robot. So it's small. When it launched, I went four or five months ago, we covered that that launch into the market. And at that time, I said the same thing. This is a cute looking little robot. It seems to be pretty functional as well. But I think that acquisition probably goes in the bucket of actually higher more than anything, right? The opportunity to bring in a talented group of engineers and product folks who've already thought long and hard about how to build a humanoid to further explore this opportunity, they set it in the quote, right? Understand the potential of personal robots. So again, we know that Astro failed tremendously for them. They're a little wheeled robot over the last couple of years. And now humanoid seems to be, you know, the favor of

12:28the day. And you know, this is good opportunity is any to get a good head start on, you know, exploring this, this opportunity for personal robots. You know, we've seen unitary be very successful with this sort of size robot, right? With their, with their G1 robot, they're getting ready for an IPO. We've talked about that news as well. So they're obviously, and we know most of those robots have gone into research opportunities so far of the ones that they have sold because it's a great little platform, affordable platform for doing humanoid AI research. So again, maybe there's some real opportunity for Amazon to exploit those those opportunities. Well, speaking of unitary, Washington has proposed a federal ban on Chinese robotics. So that's not necessarily banning all import Chinese robots in the US, but it would prohibit government use of such robots. So the

13:31Americans that carry a robotics act is actually five partisan. It was sponsored or introduced by Senator Tom Totten, or public, you know, Arizona and Chuck Schumer, then friend of New York. And it went from him at federal agencies from purchasing, operating, using federal funds for unmanned ground robots, certain ground handfuls, and humanoid robots. It's interesting that you focus on those. They've already banned DJI, right, which is a major drone provider. And this technological cold war between Washington and Beijing seems to be escalating. And I'm not sure, you know, the main concerns that have been cited were national security in the form of collecting data, violating privacy, maybe having backdoor to program them from the various ends. You know, all of those things are certainly known, cybersecurity vulnerabilities,

14:35and a lot of these products. So, you know, I would say that unitary and other have had the burden of proof on them to ensure that their systems are secure. But I would wonder how many unitary robots is the federal government actually using? You know, it's sort of a, is it more of a symbolic move than an actual ban that's going to affect either Chinese imports or US technology development? Well, it's certainly not routers, right? I mean, router is one thing, and there's been some concerns about, you know, the technology involved in routers that actually have a finger on the pulse of internet traffic. And that's certainly something that has been talked about as well. But I think, yeah, I think there's, there is a bit of posturing going on here. And a lot of it came from the community, from the market in the sense that, you know, that we know that the Chinese

15:37government has invested quite a bit of money in getting the Chinese humanoid market to where it is today. And obviously, it shows that the dollars work because there's been such a gross, aggressive growth in the companies. And I think that as opposed to the opposite pulse they could have taken, which would have been to drop a bunch of money from an investment standpoint into the robotics industry in the US would have been another way they could have gone here. I would argue that that's actually maybe some that they should still be considering. It's one thing when China floods the rest of the world with cheap product. And certainly, humanoid robots are no different than other systems that are now doing so. And, you know, our tariffs were partly a response to that. But here, in this case, having these vans, I don't know that that necessarily helps American industry in the way that it should, because it doesn't encourage US investment.

16:40It doesn't encourage the US to be competitive with Chinese companies under the mayvian price. And the rest of the world in the meantime has access still to those possibly vulnerable or IP infringing systems. So it's an interesting situation. We're going to continue dragging it. Right now, it's just the bill. So we'll continue following that story. But it is, again, I think interesting that there's a ban. And I suspect there's probably already a lot of federal and foreign rules or what systems the government should be using. And as from what we've been able to tell an initial writing of the bill, which could change before it gets approved, of course, this is a federal ban from federal agencies spending federal money on Chinese devices. This is not a blanket ban on, you know, unitary being able to sell to any university, although there could probably be some relationship between federal funding for that university and buying. Who knows how they might do that. But it wouldn't prevent you and me

17:43from buying a unitary robot and using it to fold the laundry. So yeah, it's it's well, we'll fought with it. That'll be interesting to follow that. All right, Gene, one of the last stories to wrap up the news here, one I reported on earlier this week, Flexcube has announced a $13 million dollar mobile robot deal. We've been following Flexcube since we elected them to be an RBR 50 winner back in 2022 for their Flexcube navigator AMR robot. And that's indeed the product that's at the center of this $13 million deal. I can't imagine there's nobody listening who would love to have a $13 million deal come over the desk. So kudos to Flexcube and the team there. They didn't name who it was, but they call them one of the world's largest US-based e-commerce and logistics companies. There's maybe a handful of companies that. Yeah, it's a pretty short list, but good for them. And you know, it's funny because you and I have written a lot about the

18:43challenges that the autonomous mobile robot market has faced in the past couple of years. And it's nice to see that starting to turn around, right? I mean, $13 million is not a huge amount of money, but it's enough to have this player continue to be on the board and continue doing new things and getting out to real customers. It validates the product, right? That they've built a product that the market wants to buy. And it's taken them a couple of years to mature it, but again, it's a great addition to their portfolio. So again, kudos to Anders and the team. All right, and that's going to do it. Jean, so for the news, we reminded that we've got you covered with all the latest news and information from our network of websites that include the robot report and automated warehouse. Now, Jean, I've got two webinars coming up the next two weeks. I got a busy webinar schedule. Next week on April 1st, we've got an automated warehouse webinar titled Autonomous Mobile Robots. Go to the warehouse edge and beyond. And it features quite a lineup of panelists,

19:49sir. We've got Nick Clark from Slip Robotics. We've got Matt Leach from Pickle Robot Company. I've got Kevin Demola from Glide Technologies and Gina Chung from Locust Robotics. That's going to be a lively conversation. You can sign up for that webinar. Automated warehouse online.com slash webinars. And then in two weeks, Jean, I've got another very interesting webinar for the robot report called Best Practices for Robot Design. And it features Ted Larson from Ologic and Spencer Krauss, who was recently on the show from SKA Robotics. And you can go sign up for that one at therobotreport.com slash webinar. So just go to either website slash webinars to see the latest list of webinars. Yeah, Mike, I'm looking forward to listening to both of those webinars because I know most of not all of those speakers and we really got some really good ones this time around. So I definitely wouldn't recommend all of you register for them right away. But now onto our

20:53featured speaker, Arthur Erickson, Kel Fowler and CEO of Helio Drones. We sat down with Arthur earlier this week to learn about his company and some of the challenges and opportunities in that environment. Well, I want to welcome on the this show today. We've got Arthur Erickson. He's CEO of Helio, an American-made drone company. Arthur, welcome to the podcast. Happy to be here. Thanks, Mike. Yeah. So, hey, it's been a while since our last conversation. And what I wanted to start with Arthur is for listeners who might not be familiar with Helio. Why don't you start by give us a background on who you are and what you guys do. Yeah. So Helio was founded about 11 years ago. I started the company with two other co-founders at UT Austin. So I was studying aerospace engineering at the time. And my co-founders were also a fellow engineering and related fields. And we basically just had the idea. Drones were already a thing, but not quite as big as they are

21:55today. We had the idea, naively, that, you know, why can't we also be drone tycoons? And that's important. It's got started. So in fact, our business model back then at the beginning was, you could argue definitely a bit unfocused. We were making a general purpose industrial drone. So something that essentially had a swappable modular payload system. And what we thought, you know, was a relatively accessible software interface. And that was going to be a tool that you could fairly easily customize for different tasks like portal delivery or, you know, surveillance, you know, cinematography, you name it. So typical drone application. So we prototype that product, and that's actually what we want to market with first. But eventually, of course, as you mature as a business and as business people, you realize that you need a focus. You need to have like a niche and do that really well. So we pivoted to agriculture, which was one of like the 10 things we tried originally, but it was the one that we liked the most. We found the best project market fit in

22:55agriculture. We really liked the mission, the people of the culture. And so we just went all in on that. And that's primarily what we focused on. But actually, to bring it full circle now in 2026. So again, 11 years on, we've been successful enough that we're kind of able with our resources and bandwidth now to re-expand back to like more of like a generalist technology approach. So it's kind of the story of Helio Dallas. We cut our teeth and we did really, really well agriculture, and that's still like our primary market. But how can we somewhat, you know, relatively easily modify that technology to serve as like industrial infrastructure inspection and servicing, and also, you know, things like that, emergency response and so on and so forth. Yeah. Well, I want to stay on the drone market for a bit here at the start of the conversation. Because as you said, you've seen this market grow and expand and been a core part of that. So give me your perspective from the seat that you've held in the industry here.

23:55How has the drone market for agriculture specifically evolved? Yeah. You can kind of look at this historic work from different perspectives, right? So I think I'll focus on kind of just the macrogie political trends. So actually like for the past 10 years, and this is no surprise to anybody, China, at East Asia, but primarily China has been driving most of the innovation in let's say like the prosumer and light industrial drone space. So most of the the ag stuff has been dominated by DJI, and there's a few other brands that are less well known like X, A, G, and EA vision. These are other China-based agricultural drone producers. So these companies have been like somewhat setting the stage, and that's who Helio's been historically competing against for the past 10 years. And we've been, you know, I mean, this isn't just me saying this, and this is a truthful fact. If you just look at everything, Helio's been really the only Western option for spray drones. And everything else has really been just Chinese, right?

24:55Or you know, at best mostly Chinese with like a few other parts thrown in there, right? So Helio's been standing alone. It's kind of like the one true Western source option. And that's been a difficult battle, but we've held in there. I mean, we're here for a reason, even before any foreign drone bands, we were competing on merit and surviving and even growing and thriving, because we just do things differently, strategically. We zig when they tag. So that's all to say that, you know, China really has been kind of setting the tone as in they've been driving the price down. They've been coming out with new models like every year, sometimes like twice a year. So they've been pushing for larger payloads. They've been pushing for, you know, yeah, cheaper, cheaper price point. And that's kind of forced us in a good way to be more competitive with our cost point as well as a company. So that's been like the last 10 years, but to jump ahead and yeah, to what is different about 2026 or late 2025 and now is, yeah, we have this foreign drone band that was instituted by current administration through the FCC,

25:57basically in December of 25, they said, all foreign drones and foreign drone components are banned unless especially waived, especially exempted on a go-forward basis. So if you have a Chinese drone, DJI or whatever that you're using today, that's still fine, but the next model wouldn't be important or usable. So this is of course done in a lot of ways what you would expect, which is like part of the stated intention, which is it has created a lot of, let's say, tailwinds and like investment and interest in creating Western-sourced drones. So, you know, whereas Helio was one of the few companies of the past decade doing this, now, you know, there's probably like half a dozen I could count easily off the top of my head and you know, probably a few dozen more that I don't even know about, that are coming up in the the ag drone space alone, let alone like, you know, drone companies pop it up for defense, for emergency response, for serving and all that. So I will say that it had the effect intended of creating this at least

26:58ostensibly like this Western drone renaissance. It's difficult to see right now predict whether or not this one should pan out to, you know, concrete long lasting sustainable Western drone ecosystem, but that's the hope. And of course, I'm optimistic. I mean, given my position, what I've been doing for the past decade, I think it's very possible, obviously, for Helio to succeed. Our a lot of these newcomers going to succeed just depends on, you know, the team, if they get lucky breaks or not, but it's still hard even with this band in place, right? So as they say, hardware is hard. Drones are, you know, not only hardware, but they're flying hardware and they're software elements. There's everything put together. So it's a tough business to be in. It's easy to kind of show off. I think it makes like a prototype drone. It's hard to actually scale us do a business, which is what we've done. So Arthur, you mentioned the DJI van and van on uncertain foreign made drones. How is that van affecting farmers and service providers? Are you seeing, you know, is your business getting enough tech from that? Yes. In fact, I mean, even before

28:03the band came through, of course, there was talk about it chatter. So I'd say even starting in late 24, early 25, there was already a lot of people coming over to the helioside, just, you know, out of, you could say the abundance of caution, right? So we, at back, we didn't know whether or not, you know, if it would just be a DJI van or if we actually, the industry didn't really predict it would be like an all foreign drones pan. That kind of came out of nowhere for most people, I would say. So it ended up being like all foreign drones. But yeah, we've, I mean, for the entire history of Helio, we've, we've had, you know, a fair amount of attention. That's because we're American made and people care about the data security. They care about just the customer support, you know, being in your time zone, that just cultural connection with the company. So that's been really important. But for sure, it has accelerated since, you know, talks to this band even started, and then of course, even more after the band went into effect. And how much does being U.S. matter to your customers? Is it something that they're interested in? Is it more matter of

29:03price sensitivity? You mentioned the supply chain issues. It's mattering more and more with everything going on like from a regulatory perspective geopolitically in terms of supply chain disruptions and all that. It's starting to matter more in a practical sense and not just be philosophical talking point, right? Because like, let's say five or six years ago, you have your die hard, you know, your people that are like, you know, that really matters to them just on an ideological level. Helio's always, you know, had, had favor with them. But as, you know, stuff has developed recently, it's now actually a question of like, will you legally be able to use your drone if it's not American? Like, you're probably not depending on the case, but usually not. It's like, will you have to wait months for parts because of like complications with customs and border protection and just like, yeah, straight forward moves being closed and stuff like that. These are all like actual like practical concerns now. So like made in America and like

30:04parts sourced here and support here actually has a measurable effect on your outcomes versus just like the idea, you know, raw raw made in America, right? So I think it's becoming more important. It was always important to some group of people. Now it's becoming important to even just like your, your pragmatist, if you want to call it that. Yeah. I mean, I look, I fly a DJI drone for photography, for fun. But you know, and I know I talked a lot of my photographer friends. It's just like the fears of crash or drone. It's like, how are you going to replace it, right? And I imagine that your customers from an industrial side have same concern. Your customers, but the service provider network is a whole using, you know, that equipment. It's it's like my business is in peril. If I crash my drone and I can't, my Chinese drone and I can't replace it, right? So that's one of probably one of the decision factors a lot of folks are weighing. Yeah. Now I want to come back to the agricultural drone market because again, I'm curious and I'm sure a lot of folks are curious as

31:04well. Again, the evolution of this, the opportunities here, I know that that you guys talked about mapping was one of the first opportunities for drones that going from photography to to mapping, industrial mapping of the fields and, you know, trying to find stress plants and that type of thing. How has the the primary use cases that the farmers actually import in one invest in evolved from those types of things to where you are today and how much of that is a part of your solution from mapping to actual application and what have you. Talk a little bit about that growth and evolution of the of the market in the use case. Yeah. So that's kind of an interesting story and it actually starts like a little bit even before my time and I consider myself like an old man in the ag drone game specifically. From my understanding as early as the early 2000s, she's getting a little bit before my time, company started in 2011, sorry 2015, but early 2000s,

32:08I understand there was a wave of drones hitting the axiom kind of for the first time in America. And these drones were being like you said used for crop scouting, at least like population counts and maybe some general identification of like, you know, big brown areas, like problem areas to treat. So this happened and apparently it left, I'm here in this on the back end from customers, right? So apparently like it didn't work very well. And so it was kind of a false start, you know, people were promising the world essentially like, oh, we've got these fancy algorithms and like these drones are amazing, but the drones were very reliable, the algorithms were kind of crap. And so it kind of gave a lot of farmers a bad taste in the mouth. So by the time he came to the scene in 2015, we started doing the ag application that farmers had this resistance. And yeah, this, so again, I heard it from one of the initial customers like, oh, like, you know, so it's okay, a few years ago with their drone and like, didn't work for crap. And so we decided not to focus on the scouting application because we felt like, I mean, a, the customer like wasn't going to buy that,

33:10given like their past history, be like it frankly, like the industry wasn't there yet. And we didn't actually think it'd be useful yet either without like AI and stuff like that to where it is today. So we said, hey, actually, as a company, we're going to focus on the application stuff first. So that's what was unique about Helio was we didn't go into the ag market like with a scouting drone. We just started straight at the payload application drone. So our first one was like a four gallon tank. Then we went bigger and bigger and bigger. And now we've got a 30 gallon tank drone. But we've always like solely focused on the payload application portion of the use case and ag. Now in 2026, we are coming up with a ISR like a scouting drone platform that is just for like the imagery or the sensor type of applications. But that's not going to be just for ag. It's going to be for for all the above, right? So and the difference is and I just touched on this. But like, I think AI being where it is now and people designing edge computing like GPU in such a way where it's like you can do decent practical edge computing and image stitching and image analysis and

34:14video analysis right there at the field. That actually makes this practical and usable now where we couldn't have done this 10, 15 years ago. So I think now is the moment to have. Yeah, I think we've covered this in other related things. We talk about autonomous tractors and the rest, the connectivity on in the field now. Certainly we have star links and other tools that that bringing high speed bandwidth connectivity to the field, right? You didn't have that even five years ago. So that's closing the loop on that and giving you other opportunities. But when you talk about the use case then of payload based in application. So it's really, I just want to make sure I'm clear that you're competing with the classic crop tester in this case or the field tank application pulled by an attractor kind of application. That's the ROI that you're sort of changing the model for the end user didn't client, right? Yeah, it's right. In a lot of cases it is directly competing or replacing traditional equipment, which is like your point either

35:20pull behind or self-propelled ground rigs or helicopters or airplanes. But in a lot of cases it is just like I couldn't have done this really practically like economically or geographically before period. And the drone is like, oh, I can finally like I've got this one lot in the quarter of my property. That's like kind of like there's a lot of trees around it and it's hard to get to. And no one like it's not really worth anyone's time to go spray with traditional equipment because it's too expensive. But now I can do it with the drone. So there's both of that. I think as the drones get bigger, which we've seen, of course, it is starting to more and more directly cannibalize market from these old players. So like now that we've got the 30 on drone and they're swarm capable, they're autonomous. We're about to develop, I should I say about but it's still like a year or two out. But you know, autonomous refill and recharge station. Once you've got like multiple 30 on drones out there that are autonomously rechargeable refilling, you've got a lot of gallonage in the air at once. And so, you know, you could treat thousands of acres per day pretty easily. So I think once you get to that point, yeah, there's kind of no reason why you could have replaced like a giant

36:26traditional tractor spray rig. And yeah, I don't want to be too like, I don't know like Bellicose. I'm not like, I'm not saying that there isn't a place for these big pieces of equipment. But I think application spring could be done way better drones than almost every case. And these big tractors and whatnot can still be used for other stuff like plowing and tailoring and all that. Now Arthur, you know, it has evolved from being a drone service provider. What is the role of such service providers in the current market? Yeah, so we were a service provider at first and that was fine necessity. And also like on intentionally so we could learn the market. So we went up to always sell the technology as a turnkey solution. And so we were like, hey, let's be our own first customer, cut and sell it to ourselves, use it, and then learn and make it and feed back and all that. So that's where we came from. That's where I why I think we really understood that the product market fit and like made a really intuitive interface I think in the first place. And we continue that legacy today. I mean, a lot of our product development and stuff to this day is still driven

37:27bottom up, right? So getting it into customers hands sooner than better, right? So even like alpha and beta models to, you know, select group of customers that we work really well with that are pretty savvy. So get it to them, get their feedback, do like a really formal review process and in intake of that feedback. So we still do that. Service providers are becoming, okay, well, let me back up. So historically, I think we've always sold like 50, 50, so 50% to the farmers and producers themselves in general, like directly. And then the other 52% more to these service providers that are servicing that the farmers are dangerous and whatnot. And so it was about 50, 50 split, but in the last year or two, it's definitely like leaning 70, 30 maybe towards a service provider. So you're seeing the market kind of just consolidate now, as you would expect to actually like to where these service providers are able to go out and get working capital for this and have a business model can scale the assets more so they can buy more Helio drawings and more

38:27supporting equipment and deploy more efficiently and just, you know, make that business model work for everybody where they're going to service 20, 30 farmers in their area. And then those farmers don't have to buy the drugs and get the licenses, but the service provider does. So I think that's a natural evolution of like this equipment, just the business model. So we welcome it. And like to that effect, we're adding a lot of features recently that are you know more than enterprise software side where it's kind of work order management, kind of like a work order program built into our ground control station. So tracking your jobs and like doing billing through the program and having like a super user and sub users. So it's like you could be a supervisor pilot and have pilots beneath you. So we're adding all these things to not just enhance like the day of spraying, but like the entire operation. So yeah, I think that's how it's going to keep going. And eventually as things get even more automated, like the service providing aspect of it might be less of service providers go directly spraying

39:29in each of the drones, but they'll be managing like the autonomous like children of box assets. So they might, you know, be able to scale up even bigger and have like a hundred of these and like a region and then their service is like refilling them occasionally, you know, doing the maintenance and all that. So I see it going that way. So you mentioned the autonomy aspect and obviously that's an important technology enabler here. How autonomous or how mature is the autonomy for these agricultural drones today? Can the operator or farmer do it themselves? You know, how much expertise is required? And isn't something that is still the ratio of drones to pilots is still pretty low? Yeah. Well, Helio is unique in the sense that we do have the most I think before agriculture, especially the most like accessible swarm interface. So back in March of 24, and we might

40:31have talked about this, but we got the FAs first exemption for swarming larger than the 55-pound drones. And that's because again, how intuitive and basically robust and safe we made our artificial structure both on the hardware and the software side. So I would argue it I'm a little biased, but I've pat ourselves on the back because I think that I mean, our drones are shockingly easy to use for a layman or just, you know, a logical person because when we've seen it firsthand, we've sold to, you know, both people, let's say like, you know, older people that you might not expect to be super technically literate. And even like really super young people that don't really have like a formal education yet. So like 16-year-old farmhand who's like, you know, working the drone on his grandfather's farm or whatever, you know, both sides have been able to basically pick the drones up. And within, let's say, just one morning, basically self-teach and then use the drone like fairly effectively. So like, it's about, you know, also having the guardrails in the right places. Of course, we provide all this manual like documentation and

41:34like tutorial videos and even a simulator in the software that they can practice, you know, add in for an item, they can do like unlimited fake drone flights before they do a real one. We have all these tools. Do people always use all of them? Not really. But the point is, he still have all these guardrails in the software in the hardware that prevent like at least like a catastrophic situation. So we have obstacle detection and avoidance. The mission planning is such where like if you're flying multiple drones at a swarm configuration, you can't have them, you know, bump into each other just by nature. There's a horizontal and vertical t-confliction. All these things that we've built in, yeah, just, you know, keep you, I mean, bumpers. So the thing is it's like you can learn how to use the drones and be pretty effective day one. Mastering them, so to speak. Of course, that takes a little bit longer. So like, you know, becoming the most efficient drone operator possible, you know, eking out that extra few percentage points of productivity. That comes with experience and just understanding the different, you know, geographical things, your tackling and whatnot. But it's remarkably easy for anybody to pick it

42:36up and really use it inside of a day, which I think is a tremendous achievement that we've accomplished. And so for the farmers who are offering the drones themselves, do you have a way that you would describe them? Are they, you know, large or small? Are they a little more remote locations? I like, for example, of like, oh, here's this out of the white plot. That's a little bit more under, you know, surrounded by trees or more difficult. And certainly, I'm on the East Coast. We have a lot of smaller farms that are like that here. What kind of farmers are using the drones themselves? I mean, all kinds. So that's what's cool about the, the concept of drones in general, and in just kind of stated industry now is that it's modular. So it's modular in two ways. That I mean, like, in application to like what size farm you have, right? So either you could buy bigger drones, if you have a bigger, bigger Plano land, or if you have a more product to put out, or you could buy multiple drones. So like in the most extreme case, if you have 10,000 acres

43:40just right, you'd buy, you know, three or five of like our biggest 30 gallon drone. If you just have like a 20 acre like blueberry situation up in like the Northeast, then you could just buy maybe one or two of our smaller drones. Like maybe the two gallon model or like the, you know, the 10 gallon or whatever it is, right? So I should say 13. But yeah. So that's the, what's cool about as you can kind of access it at different levels. And like, I mean, regardless, like you're going to come in way cheaper, like I should say cost effective, not cheaper, right? It's kind of a bad example. But more cost effective than like basically any traditional equipment. I mean, even like a small pull behind, you know, spray rig for like your tractor, you still need a tractor, something to pull it, maybe like a side by side. And then you need the spray rig. You're still going to be in like 40, 50 grand, which is about where our drones are. So like at the lowest end, you're at price parity, but at the highest end, of course, yeah, buying like a big spray rig is like four or five or two grand or helicopter, whatever. So yeah, you're basically more cost effective than almost every scenario.

44:45And you can scale up and down as you need to. So a lot of people we see is like, they'll come in, like especially real crop farmers, which I know is not exactly what you ask, but we have a lot of real crop farmers like customers. That's probably our biggest customer demographic. So a lot of them will just start as one or two of like our mid-sized drones, but maybe trade those in for the bigger ones. Once they realize, I hate this, actually does work. And like I just wouldn't be more efficient. It's very even more acres or I picked up some of my neighbors acres. Yeah, or they'll just, you know, buy more. So they'll prefer like smaller mid-sized drones, but they just prefer having more of them so they can spread on operations geographically, where they have redundancy and so on and so forth. So there's like different flavors of operating, too. So like the biggest drone we have, which we keep mentioning is the Atlas 30 gallon one. That one is so big that you can't carry it by yourself as one single person. You have to have at least two people. So that is one consideration. It's a beast of a drone. It could do, you know, hundreds of acres per hour, but you have to have at least that team of two. So you just have to approach it differently. I mean, it's going to factor

45:47into your calculation. It says the producer or the operator that's using it. Well, another thing that will factor in right now is the price of fuel going up, right? I mean, we already heard about the possibly price shocks eventually affecting agriculture. And so when you think of what a tractor or a helicopter costs for fuel, there's a argument that you made there as well. For sure. The other thing that to think about when we talk about the fleet management is obviously the and around control software aspect. I know Helio has Agressol. Can you talk a little bit about building that software stack and, you know, are you using a lot of AI in it and how is that evolved as your own customer faces grown? Yeah. So our software, which we call Agressol Ground Control Station or GCS, is probably like our crowning technical achievement. It's been, I mean, it's what we started working on even before the company started 11 years ago. And of course,

46:50it's had different names and like it's, we've forked it to do different things over the years. But it's like a really robust, rich, I mean, huge platform that can do a lot of things. And so architecturally, it is really, I think, future-proofed. I mean, we built it in such a way where it is modular, so you could just slap, you know, new things on. So, you know, we do Ag now, but we're going to do fire suppression one day, just as an example, like we get pretty easily, you know, build off of that scaffolding and just have like a whole other like front, like a front end, right? That's just for like firefighters or whatever it is. So it was built very much with that mindset. And again, that's because like we started the company, we're like, hey, we want to do multiple industrial applications. So we kept that, fortunately, we still have that flexibility today. To answer your question about AI, of course, Mike, our CTO, Nikhil, who's, you know, been the guy for the software this whole time, he worked at AI at Nvidia. So like, you know, one of the prominent, if not one of the, if not the most prominent company in AI right now,

47:53in that space, he was doing AI projects with them actually before he came up with a helio full time. So he really knows his stuff. The hardware that we're running GCS on is chosen specifically for, you know, future proofing for AI for computer and all that. And then yeah, that the software itself is incorporating a lot of AI right now, like on the, on the route planning side, obstacle detection or the void inside. So it's a kind of under the hood. So for example, when you draw an area in Agressol, we've got some tools that we've been, you know, training to optimize the path. So that's like a subtle way that you'd interact with it today, like every day is a customer. But more explicitly, we're now adding a lot of just traditional, I say traditional, I mean, like it's nothing crazy, but like machine learning based tools for identifying crop issues. So the agronomic site. So, you know, like we're going to, we're going to focus on

48:53use cases right now that are really immediate for a customer base. So identifying, you know, Palmer pigweed or Johnson grass, like common weeds that a lot of our customers see. And so that's a relatively easy use case. It gets complicated as you try to scale something and I'm trying to make this point before to other people, maybe not super well, but the point a lot of people outside of farming don't understand is that like farming just changes region to region pretty dramatically. And like that's biology too. So like the same weed might not look exactly the same in one region that it does at another one. And of course, there's similarities, but there's, you know, subtle speciation and stuff that can make a difference. So we're trying to like start with the models, you know, one region at a time, but then make it to where the customers can actually fine tune their models through a very intuitive interface and have like a hyper localized model that they can prune in tune on their own setup. And that would apply best for like their little microclimate.

49:54So I think like that's the, maybe the unique thing that we're doing to approach implementing AI and RStack is to make it highly customizable on the user end. So that's about, you know, creating this architecture where they can easily train it themselves and it's not, it doesn't feel like where it feels like it's actually useful. And it's kind of just part of the normal process flow. It's like all the while kind of the background that they do like a few annotations and corrections. Eventually, it'll become like way, way, way better for their exact use case. And it'll feel like a very personalized tool for them. So I think that's the approach we're taking generally right now. I want to come back to the hardware aspect for a moment, designing and building drones in the US today. And you know, again, we, at the top of the show, we talked about the impact of the DJI and Chinese drone band. And that's probably landed a great opportunity for you guys. As you said, you already had a head start. We're well versed in building drones. You've built your own drones since the beginning and you're now building some of the biggest heavy

50:55left drones in the industry, which is incredible. But as a hardware component manufacturer, you know, I'm curious that, you know, what's the supply chain, like what supply chain concerns do you have about being able to get the components, motors, chips, and the rest, that kind of stuff that you're sort of dealing with. What you're able to share, or I'm not asking to share anything here that's important to feature your business. But just as for other folks that are building robots and have the same sort of, you know, concerns about the potential macroeconomic issues that we're facing right now, what have you learned? You have us some of the lessons we've learned as a CEO building the business here and some of your thoughts about or wishes for, you know, how the supply chain might need to evolve for you to continue to be remain, you know, a prominent U.S. manufacturer for, you know, robotic-like systems.

51:56Yeah, no, that's a great question right now. Obviously, it's very pertinent to the moment. There's a few things I think I think it is tricky. It's tricky from the get-go to do like rapid prototyping, especially like on the electronic component side, because, you know, that's the strength of China is that, in everyone's already heard this, but like Shenzhen is basically the, this one village, I mean, city. You can do anything and everything there, it turns up like electronics. And so, I mean, the unit economics, even from just like one off, like PCBs, or just prototypes, is so much vastly cheaper than in the U.S. and like so. In the U.S., you can't really have a fab make you like one PCB, you know, for under probably like $1,000 versus, you know, can get it for like 50 bucks probably in China. So, I think like, especially at the very early stage, it's kind of hard. I will say it gets better, right? So, when now, he'll use at the point where we have enough volume where we can say, hey, we're going to order, you know, 30,000 PCBs or

52:57whatever it is. And even in the U.S., you know, oh, the dreaded U.S. with a tie prices, I mean, it's kind of a myth. If you order enough volume, then U.S. PCB fabs and stuff can do pretty competitive prices. So, like that's, we finally reached that stage of volume where we could do that and leverage our capital. So, like, there is like that rocky period at the beginning. And like, I'm not sure if we, as the West have solved that yet. And again, we're past that now. So, it's not like a huge thing for us. I mean, we still do prototyping, but a lot of prototyping will do now, it's just like we literally just do it ourselves and house. As much as we can, I mean, you know, breadboards and our two videos and stuff. And then kind of come into like a big mature, like, you know, order already. So, I digress the point is, that's tricky. I don't know if we figure that out yet. That's a Western infrastructure, but we need to. The tough stuff, too, even at scale, is motors and batteries. That's still hard. Yeah. Again, fortunately Helio, I mean, we've been

53:58doing this the whole time. So, we put work in already like three, four years ago, have a car conversations with these non-Chinese sources for motors and batteries. And we're this whole time, we've been working with them to kind of scale their production and do like an OEM design that fits our use case. So, you know, by now, basically by the end of this year or early next year, we actually hope to even all frame like any Chinese components in the motors and batteries, which is, you know, famously like every company in the world is still using Chinese magnets in in their electric motors and Chinese lithium and the batteries. So, still, still the case for us right now, but we have these options we've been developing here, StateSign, and also like in Europe and Korea, Taiwan, that we're going to be able to pivot to again by the end of this year. So, that just takes time. And frankly, it's expensive. I think that's going to improve. I guess from the context that we, you know, knew entrepreneurs in the space, like, it's just something to look out for as the industry develops because like there's been a lot of

54:59serious talk and I think real effort to have these Western sources for lithium and whatnot. So, these, these fabs like, you know, refiners and stuff are coming online and it's going to get better and better, you know, over the next few years. So, if you're entering the space, I would say like start the conversations early with people that can at least, you know, violently in a few years be like your motor, your battery manufacturers, because you need to have those options ready to pivot to, when and if like it becomes impossible to get forward source batteries or motors or magnets or rare earths or whatever. I mean, yeah, we're at more with EVA basically, right? So, it's like really any day, there could be a huge, rare earth shortage, you know, it's somehow related to this because like there could be Chinese sanctions in this and that or whatever. So, you have to be ready to pivot and yeah, that just takes time. You got to start the conversations with these vendors early and there is like a bit of it, which like I'll frankly say it's kind of out of control because the infrastructure in the West does need to catch up and yeah, we've been like fortunately, JP Morgan even did like this trillion dollar funding thing, right?

56:03To, you know, build like critical American infrastructure. So, AI tech, battery tech, etc. But all that is like just kind of in the past year or two been started. So, we're still like a few years out from like having this really robust infrastructure. I'm optimistic. I think we'll get there and probably faster than people think. But yeah, it's not like it's not all set in place yet. So, there's a lot of just like neat right out to be flexible and really like keep your eyes open. Yeah, I guess I'm curious then. Do your clients value USA made components in your drones? Is that an issue that they're asking you about when you go to sell them or is it just a side effect now that everything's come together as it has? No, I mean, for sure. It's valued from that pragmatic perspective of like, is it going to be available? Like, I don't, if we decide, you know,

57:03something something with the Iran or China, it might get to be able to buy, you know, a spare whatever it is like during the season. So, like, yeah, that's like the practical question. So, it is valued in that sense. You know, in the case of motors and batteries, that is just what the entire industry deals with. So, like, helium, the meantime, you know, we just ensure that we have a ton of volume of those parts. So, like, even if there was some sort of issue, like, you know, got a year's worth. So, you've got to stuff your supply chain with. Exactly. You're just a big project. I'm going to say, you know, like, less direct manufacturing control over, of course. So, yeah, have like a year's worth of that stuff. Be ready for really anything. And then, like I said, yeah, we've got this offer I've already planned for these non-Chinese sources for those. Well, aren't there statements for verification? You mentioned earlier how, you know, sort of come full circle. You start with this modular, more general architecture, focus on ag, and now you're coming back around. Our siblings like Solar Power World recently covered your company. Can you talk a little bit about how you're working with Solar Farm businesses?

58:06Yeah. So, it's not that's not far off from what we already do in ag, which is most people using our drones for solar industry are just spraying for weak control underneath the panel. So, it's like almost all the same, just, you know, software control and everything in the same hardware. But there's some modification. So, like, it kind of branches off, right? So, you take our normal sprayer drone, and typically for a solar, like you want to fly down the rows, you want to have some sort of directional nozzle to kind of get up underneath the panels. So, we've outfitted some of our drones. Some of our customers have done this themselves too, right? So, you know, it's a modular platform. People can tinker with it pretty easily, and we allow for that. But, you know, they'll point directional pressure walls, pressure nozzles or wands to get up underneath the solar panels. And then there's also now cleaning of the solar panels using pressure washers and whatnot under drones too. So, yeah, from those two angles, like weak control and for cleaning the panels, we have people retrofit our technology.

59:09And once in that market youth, you might want to go after. Is there, you know, you mentioned obviously that there's a cleaning annual here and solar. That's an area of interest. Are there other markets that you're looking at? Yeah, I think parcel delivery, for example, in numerous contexts. It's actually something we did as a company, you know, way back in the day, like for emergency response. And this is kind of closer to home for us, literally like back last year's summer, we had a really bad flooding in, you know, the hill country area of Texas. And actually there was a lot of instances of people using not our drones, none of our drones. I don't think we're utilized as far as I know, maybe one of our customers did, but people were using, you know, some of these large drones that they have out there to deliver food, water, antibiotics, stuff like that to people stuck on like the rooftops that were stuck for often days or even weeks after that, I think. Maybe that's like a week or so. So, it was really useful in that context and like, it doesn't necessarily seem like a huge scalable thing,

1:00:10but in that one moment, like that drone delivering that water is like literally life or death. So, I think like emergency response against one use case, but getting our drones into fire departments and police departments for just a variety of things, not just, you know, like the typical use case you think for these places is just ISR, right? So just videography or whatever, like monitoring the situation, which is useful. So they can do that with our new like photon ISR platform, but even these other like niche things that I'm describing, like the delivery of, you know, emergency material or just, I mean, like there's all sorts of weird stuff like we have a customer right now that's basically trying to use one of our drones as just like a light. So it's like when you have an accident like on the roadway and there's not like a lot of visible light, you want to have like the scene secured, you want to have like the rescue people maybe, you know, the operators be able to just like basically see what they're doing. So, if you could go out there with a drone, instead of like this big like, you know, expensive

1:01:13tower thing you have to tell out there for like a light, the drone just flies up to like 40 feet and just casts like a spotlight on the whole scene, that really helps with visibility and just efficiency and safety of the operation. So there's stuff like that. So I think in the emergency response sector, there's a lot of different niches that, you know, they'll tell us, not the other way around. So to be bottom up and show those like a million different little things that please departments and part of departments one out of the technology that they could do better with with the drones than, you know, whatever they're using now. So that's another industry. Industrial, I mean, you mentioned solar specifically, but like that's a huge umbrella too. So down here in Texas, there's a lot of pipeline inspection. So we're helping out with that. There's pipeline management. So like, let's say, easement or right away management too. So sometimes that's spraying for weeds just like in our ag context, but sometimes that's like mapping out the trees as they overhang, like, you know, closer to power lines or pipelines and then getting like a 3D map of that and then understanding, you know, the growth rate and all that,

1:02:16so you know, when to come in and cut them and like basically precisely how much to cut them and really optimize like the the servicing of these entire networks. So it's all the above. There's there's a cut of different stuff that we're getting into now. Yeah, I can think of like rail and like you were saying power line inspection. There's so many potential applications. I guess that gets back to the question of, can you design your payloads that be modular, that can be readily or easily swapped out, or do you design the drone for the platform rather for a specific market? For sure, like just by definition, with our approach, which I got I mentioned at Aussie, but like because we always had this idea of being like crossed industry, all of our stuff harder it's offered is just like an open architecture and like pretty easily like customizable. So there's always been like the DDA for product line. The areas I would describe, I mean, is like extremely modifiable because basically you can easily take out like the tank from the middle. So it's got like a big 13 gallon tank. You literally just take it out. It's a

1:03:18compression fit, gravity fit. So you take it out and suddenly you're just left with like the drone and like this like nice mounting service because it's got like a carbon fiber frame in the middle and you could easily attach whatever you want to this frame. So you could drill some holes in it where you could zip tie some stuff to it whatever you needed, which is a nice little chassis for you to work off of. So yeah, what we're doing to even make this easier, like for example, not just for the areas but for all of our products is like we're going to start especially adding like quick connect disconnect like rail systems to the bottom of the chassis. So you can do the spray thing or you can take off that take like a just subscribe you can stick on like yeah sensor for for yes I saw or whatever it is that you get to do in like in fact a lot of the emergency response stuff and even like defense oriented stuff like they like to work off like pick a teeny rails like you have like on your your rifle for example. So it's like you can stick some pick a teeny rails on there and basically that'd be compatible with like a ton of like the optics and whatnot that these departments are using. So that's just like simple easy stuff you

1:04:22do to make this like even more modular. Well Arthur it's I it's been fun to catch up with you because it really sounds like it's a bit of a Cinderella story for you guys here in the sense that you've you've been heads down working hard for the last decade and now the market opportunity pivot has is offered you the opportunity to thrive now with the technology and platform that you built and it's fun to celebrate this for a moment with you in terms of where you are and the opportunity you have going forward. So I'm going to thank you for joining us today and giving us a bit of a history lesson as well as a look ahead of the opportunity that you guys are bringing to the market. So thanks for joining us on the show today. Yeah thank you hopefully I didn't put too many people to sleep with the history stuff but yeah I think it's important context but yeah appreciate it. So thanks again Arthur for taking the time to speak with us Mike you know I really liked the discussion of Helio's modular design. I think having that ability to change payloads

1:05:28is really going to help the robot scale and be useful keep in mind that we're talking about a drone that's not a small camera drone we're talking about a payload and carrying like a 30 gallon tag which is something significant. When you think about the cost of fuel for a crop duster or for a helicopter right or traditional pull behind equipment this has an opportunity of really helping small and mid-sized farmers get out there. The other thing I thought was interesting in our conversation was that Helio has come full circle from generalist systems early on to more specialized ones for agriculture and now similarly back again. Yeah I think it is an interesting pivot we always like to talk about pivots this is one of those ones where they they back they have in a way back into it as he described you know but they have definitely slogged it out for many years now trying to to perfect their solution for this application market and so I think that's

1:06:35awesome story and I'm going to be able to celebrate that with him you know and they've also have lucked out in a sense or luck is always a part of any entrepreneurs career with the the recent DJI ban which we talked about at the top of the show which is now shine a spotlight on them as one of the you know the most mature US drone manufacturers for industry right they don't have a consumer drone you can't go buy a camera drone from them to go take pictures of the wettings but but certainly if you need to to put some chemicals on you on your back 40 of your property you need to go check them out so yeah it was interesting and might be yeah some other taken ways from rock conversation yeah thanks so I mean I love the intention behind their strategy you know to build local and international relationships for their critical components again that does take prudent planning right that's not luck that's being intentional about sourcing

1:07:36and you know every robot manufacturer has to think about sourcing when it comes to building your supply chain for the products that go into building your actual robot right so that's important and I think we're living in a world today gene where the supply chains matter we're seeing that with the current world economic situation doesn't take much to disrupt the supply chain and suddenly your business forecast is way off right so it's important for everybody to consider so I hope you guys all took something away from the conversation with Arthur there I also we talked about this a few seconds ago you know the pivots right so being able to be reactive to be able to to take what you have and and pivot and find something else that can benefit that you know your roadmap and your business when the time comes and that's certainly important as well you know the fact that they had built a heavy lift platform now have the motors and batteries and in what have you to lift anything

1:08:37that's heavy means that they can retrofit this with any number of payload configurations now and turn it into some other thing is a great great baseline to have for the product line you know and finally back to the first point you know the proactively sourcing non-Chinese component you know I think it's just prudent and so I hope that we can continue to see the supply chain for motors for control boards he talked about PCBs as an issue right being able to prototype and get a PCB built you know we've got a build that capability back here state side so that entrepreneurs can can build on their vision quickly and efficiently so so thanks to Arthur for joining us this week once again the talking about vision looking ahead I want to remind everybody that robotic summit next bow is coming soon registration is now open most of the agenda is now live on the site although some expo floor opportunities still do exist the robotic summit will take place on

1:09:43May 27th and 28th 2026 in Boston will have more than 250 exhibitors or expecting well over 5,000 attendees and if you've been waiting and listening here's your award you can use it discount code POD 25 for a 25 percent discount only for our podcast listeners so we want to thank all the people who have been loyal and listened and stay tuned and you can register now at robotic summit.com yeah jeans coming real where we're a couple months away now six weeks away probably from from the event so now's the time to sign up I know I I need to get my plane ticket too I don't have my plane ticket yeah I blocked that in before the before the gas prices get too big so well Jean thanks for joining me on the show this week it was fun it was also fun to talk to Arthur Erickson of highly old drone so thanks to Arthur and thanks to all of you for for joining us again

1:10:43this week new episodes of the podcast drop each week you can find us anywhere you get your podcasts so please subscribe leave us a rating give us a review but most importantly share this episode with a friend so we can continue to grow our audience this episode was produced by me and edited by Tyler Kabisti thanks to Jean Dimitri for joining me on the show today our executive producer is a man a beauty and thanks everybody for listening